Handicapped
by vodka straight
Summary: Ephraim and Amy have run away to New York. This next chapter is more sad and disturbing than the first, if that's possible. Involves a sexual situation. PLEASE BE WARNED-THIS IS NOT A HAPPY ROMANTIC STORY ABOUT AMY AND EPHRAIM!
1. Default Chapter

When he heard the rocks hitting his window, he was firstly frightened. The room was dark, and it was almost midnight, at least, if not after one, and he was lying alone in a room that had always secretly frightened him a little. He froze.  
  
The rocks hit the window again. A handful of small, pebble-ish rocks that he couldn't imagine were natural anywhere around his house. When the rocks hit the window for the third time, he twitched. He stood slowly. He walked over to the dark window in nothing but his boxers and looked out, as the dim, shallow yellow light from the streetlamp faded in.   
  
Amy.  
  
She stood in the grass on the far side of his front yard, wearing dark jeans and a black turtleneck. Ephraim laughed to himself and pulled up his window glass.   
  
"Where's your ski mask?" he called down.   
  
Amy was silent, staring up at him with a pale face that looked like fear.   
  
"Amy, what the fuck-"  
  
Amy made a decapitating gesture with her hand across her neck, and then she waved him down.   
  
Ephraim made a big-eyed face and pointed down with the first fingers on both hands incredulously.   
  
Amy nodded bigly.   
  
Ephraim shook his head and spun his finger in a circular motion around his ear. "Crazy" he mouthed.   
  
Amy only gestured him down more ardently. Ephraim didn't know for sure, but there seemed to be a ring of desperation in her body. He sighed heavily and frowned down at her. He held up a finger to wait, and fumbled back into his room, grabbing a shirt and throwing it on and then sticking his head out into the hallway. His father's door was closed, and his lights were off. Ephraim felt himself bite his lower lip compulsively.   
  
He slipped on sock-less sneakers and threw one pale, skinny leg over the edge of the window. He would have attempted going through the downstairs, if it didn't have a security system attached to the front door. He supposed that if a man started climbing in Ephraim's window, he was expected to get the hell out of the room before he had to worry about it. Either that or Andy just forgot.   
  
Ephraim dangled from the gutter and dropped, as he had before, landing somewhat more deftly on his feet and then his knees on the grass. He got up quickly and brushed himself off. Amy grabbed his elbow and led him around the side of the house. When they got there Ephraim snapped his elbow out of her grasp with an angry nip and reeled on her.   
  
"What the fuck are you doing?" he whispered harshly.   
  
"Ephraim!" she whispered back, not so much as to quiet him, it seemed, but out of pure surprise and a little disgust at his reaction.   
  
How was it that he could never hold a temper against her? She was probably the one person in his life who deserved a little hatred, but he just couldn't. Not for lack of trying. She wasn't only disarming, she made him feel guilt in his anger, even in his just anger, and he reviled that the most.   
  
"Amy, what the hell are you doing?" he asked her calmly, looking her in the eyes.   
  
Amy's mouth tensed and quivered, and the tips of her plucked eye brows dipped downward in a sad, shaking frown.   
  
"Look, Amy-" Ephraim started, feeling the guilt rush him again.   
  
"I really I need you, Ephraim." She said, in a strong, deep voice, trying to keep from crying.   
  
"What happened?" Ephraim asked, the guilt leaving him, the anger leaving him, barren and cold like nothing; like clean snow.   
  
"My dad ... nothing." She said decidedly. "Nothing happened, I just." She looked off over Ephraim's shoulder for a long time. "Did you ever feel like you just had to leave?" she asked him. He looked at her flatly.   
  
"Of course."  
  
"Well, I ... I just have to."   
  
"You're leaving? Where the fuck to?"  
  
"I was thinking New York." She said, trying to read his face. He looked at her in surprise for a moment, and then all the features on his face leveled and flattened, as though he were a ripple of something very small. He looked at her calmly and without emotion, perhaps with a disbelieving kind of detachment.   
  
"You want me to go with you." He said.  
  
Tears clouded Amy's eyes and she nodded hopelessly.   
  
"Amy ... Amy no. Don't do this." Ephraim pleaded calmly. Amy turned away and beat her fists in the air once, bringing them down on her thighs.  
  
"God dammit!" she exclaimed. "I knew it. I knew you wouldn't do this!" she exclaimed.   
  
"Amy, it's not that-"   
  
"I came here, I came, with my pockets full of stupid pebbles so that I could throw them at your damn window because I thought you would understand!" she yelled.  
  
"Look, this sounds lame, but you're upset. It's late and you're upset about Colin, and-"  
  
Before Ephraim could finish his explanation Amy's lips were pressed up against his. Her tongue was pushing itself into his mouth. Her hands were searching up his sides, and the dark was seeming bright.   
  
Ephraim pushed her off of him angrily.   
  
"I'm going inside." he nearly yelled, turning quickly and marching heavily and quickly back toward his house.   
  
"Ephraim!"  
  
"You manipulative bitch!" he yelled.   
  
"No, no Ephraim," she sobbed from behind him. "That wasn't why I did that ... I wasn't trying to ... oh Ephraim, I wasn't!" She had the air of a girl losing something quickly. Of someone not willing to release time.   
  
"Then what the fuck do you think your doing!" he exclaimed, feeling strange tears flood his eyes. They seemed weird because he didn't know what brought them; anger or sadness or the intense, severe love he felt for this girl weeping before him in the streetlamp light on the snow in his front lawn.   
  
"I know it's wrong, okay? I know it's wrong and unfair and unkind and selfish, but I want ... I want to have what we could have had before."   
  
Ephraim looked up at the chill, clear, cold winter moon and laughed. "Are you really that codependent? When there's someone else around who's better, I'm nothing, but now you're in love with me because I'm the only one left? Amy, fuck."   
  
"Jesus, Ephraim, stop!" she begged, crumpling over on herself. "I have to *fucking* get away." she fell to her knees on the frozen snowy grass, and it cracked softly like ice beneath her jeans.   
  
Ephraim went back to her and put his arms around her despite himself. Despite every last bit of himself.   
  
"Shhh." He whispered. "What is this, Amy? What is this?"   
  
Ephraim whispered calmingly to her for almost a minute when she finally looked up at him.   
  
"Everything here is ... Colin. Everything here is Dad and Mom and, Jesus, everything here is Bright, and I can't stand it. I can't stand everything that's still *here*, even though it should be gone." She looked up at him, her eyes sparkling in water and her cheeks pink from the clear cold. "And you're the only one. You're the only one."   
  
Ephraim decided that this must be love; hating someone so much for the things they do, but loving them despite. Loving them without any taint, or any change, or any fade, despite. He tried to believe that it wasn't just how beautiful she looked in the clear light of midnight and the streetlamp and the moon, and the way his heart was pounding in the cold like some kind of creed, and the way her breath was frosting out in front of her parted lips that were bright red without make-up. And he believed it, because sadly, it was true. It was true that it didn't matter if she loved him back. It didn't even matter, god damn it.   
  
Ephraim leaned in and kissed her, and she responded the way a girl that's kissed should, and when they separated, she breathed the way a freed woman breaths, the way someone who's sure breaths, the way someone who's in motion breaths.   
  
He threw the guilt away and thought only of having what he'd always wanted.  
  
"Go get your things." She said, smiling at him purely and breathing her free-woman breath. He nodded, and he did, because he had no choice. He had never had a choice. 


	2. A loss

VERY IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE: I do NOT want any comments about the fact that this was a SEXUAL story. It is not very explicit, and you have been WARNED, TWICE now. Also, I DO believe that this scene is IMPORTANT to the way the characters are developing and seen by the readers. This is NOT a HAPPY ROMP IN THE HAY. This is something that's provoked by insecurity, anger, sadness, misunderstanding, loneliness, and grief. IF THIS IS NOT OKAY WITH YOU, READ NO FUTHER!  
  
HANDICAPPED  
  
Ephraim woke to the sound of rain outside and a young James Taylor emanating from the black retro boom box on the ground under the window. The room was chilly and the blankets were thick; the air was gray and thin and quiet; the clock on the floor next to him said nine thirty. The bathroom faucet was running, and Amy was absent from the bed next to him. His legs were spread out over the mattress as though he had slept there alone all night. He was diagonal across it, and the dim light from the blinded window falling over the white sheets and his pale chest looked like ice. He closed his eyes and his chest rose steadily as he breathed in the slow poetry of memory.   
  
It was a very small, very cheep hotel room in his hometown. They had arrived the morning they left and slept through the day, waking up only now, in the early hours of a sleepy New York morning, when the rain is steady and the air is quiet with the white noise from outside.   
  
Amy had been distant lately, but strangely affectionate. They never spoke, but she kissed him; cold, mechanical interactions when her hands fell straight to his crotch and didn't move from there until she was done. She didn't speak to him often. She never looked into his eyes.   
  
The faucet shut off suddenly, and the door of the bathroom was cracked open. White steam and light fled into the bedroom.   
  
Ephraim sat up. Then lay back down. The steam thinned and the door opened all the way. Amy stood in the doorway, naked, framed glowingly in steam and florescence. Her hair hung limply and her body had the sheen of hot water. The smoky steam blurred the lines and definitions of her body, and she looked like Aphrodite emerging from the foam.  
  
She walked to him and lay on top of him. Her slick lips fell on his with an urgent carelessness; she tasted of soap and toothpaste, and she smelled of clean, sheer steam; her slipping, wise hands removed his clothes.   
  
Her wet blonde hair shielded them and brushed him; it was cold and smelling cleanly of oranges. This awful, sad need radiated from her. This need to feel complete in something; to seal this deal of love between Ephraim and herself. To come full circle, and embrace this awkward destiny that she had chosen for herself. She needed this and hated it at once. She forced it on herself.   
  
Her eyes filled quickly and Ephraim felt tears shower his face. She closed her eyes tightly.   
  
"Amy-"  
  
"Quiet." she whispered harshly. Her body remained taught and wincing.   
  
Ephraim looked away.  
  
"Look at my face." she commanded, and he did, leaning up to kiss her lips. She didn't respond, but she didn't push him off either.   
  
Ephraim came. He immediately hated the way he sounded: as though he were a small child, whining loudly. She rolled onto the mattress next to him.   
  
Ephraim was shaking, and so was Amy. They lay there in silence for almost two minutes.   
  
"Amy," Ephraim finally started. Amy said nothing. She got up slowly and walked to the bathroom.   
  
Ephraim turned over quickly and vomited into the trashcan next to the mattress. He grabbed Kleenexes out of the box and wiped at his mouth.  
  
He lay back down on the bed, shaking again. His body was pumping and exhausted and sweating. He felt ill. He was confused ... oh, god, he was so confused. He saw her face in his mind, her long, wet blonde hair and her pale face. She was so beautiful, oh god she was so beautiful and she didn't love him.   
  
He rolled onto his side and pulled the covers around him. He closed his eyes and woke up an hour later, and Amy was dressed and eating cold sesame chicken by the window, watching the rain and listening to a young James Taylor. 


End file.
